The present invention generally relates to a medical information management system which records a patient's personal medical information onto an optical card for various management purposes.
Medical information management systems are popularly known, in which various character and image information such as characters, drawing, X-ray photograph and computer tomogram (so-called CT) originally entered in patients' case records (charts) as their personal medical information are optically or magnetically recorded onto recording media such as optical cards and magnetic disks. Such prior art medical information management systems are typically disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publications Nos. HEI 3-154970, 4-78959 and 4-98467.
Because the medical image information, in general, must be highly detailed and precise, recording, for example, a single X-ray photograph as a piece of image information usually requires a storage capacity of about one megabyte. In addition, in order for a doctor to obtain knowledge about or diagnose the morbid state of a given patient, image information corresponding to at least three X-ray photographs would be necessary. This means that a medium for recording the patient's medical information must have storage capacity of more than three megabytes.
Nevertheless, the storage capacity of today's commercially available optical cards is only about three megabytes at the most, and thus, even if some form of data compression technique etc. are employed, it is very difficult or impossible for the optical cards to record thereon more than two or three X-ray photographs of image information and character information (and/or drawing information) about the patient's personal identification, clinical history, doctor's observation and the like.
Further, in the case of a patient having a circulatory disease, the doctor may more easily obtain knowledge of or diagnose the morbid state of the patient by listening to the patient's characteristic cardiac sounds, cardiac murmurs etc., rather than by examining the patient's X-ray photograph. However, since the prior medical information management systems only express such patient's cardiac sounds, cardiac murmurs etc. in onomatopoeic words or in schematic diagram and then record these as character and image information, it is very difficult to promptly obtain knowledge about the patient's morbid state just by examining the thus-recorded character or image information.